Shopify’s API limits are unforgiving, yet ecommerce leaders still expect their ERP, CRM, and fulfilment systems to feel instant. We’ve integrated headless Shopify builds with Laravel services and internal platforms for enterprise retailers, and the pain points are consistent across projects.
Establish a canonical commerce brain
Our first move is creating a dedicated service—usually Laravel with MySQL or PostgreSQL—that owns product, price, and inventory truth. Shopify becomes a consumer rather than the master. This reduces drift between wholesale allocations, D2C stock, and regional tax logic while letting internal teams run batch jobs without fighting Shopify constraints.
Treat integrations as event-first
Instead of nightly CSVs, we subscribe to Shopify webhooks via Node.js/Express listeners, publish them to AWS SQS, and replay them through Laravel jobs that enrich data before pushing into ERPs. The event log gives support teams a timeline whenever an order looks odd and allows replaying individual events without full re-syncs.
Engineer for throughput and failure
We aggressively cache reference data, respect Shopify’s leaky bucket algorithm, and wrap every outbound call inside idempotent middleware. Retries, poison queues, and circuit breakers keep spikes from cascading into internal outages. During a holiday peak we absorbed 7x traffic without breaching limits because the integration tier shed load correctly.
Make testing boring
Contract tests verify every webhook payload against real fixtures, and we run them automatically in GitHub Actions using Dockerised services. Synthetic orders in a staging store prove downstream systems can keep up before we ever cut DNS. When QA signs off, stakeholders know we validated the full system, not just the headless storefront.
How we help
Whether you need lightweight middleware or a full integration platform, we’ve already built and battle-tested the patterns. We drop in as the senior team who actually ships and stays on to support operations.